We waited nearly an hour for Harwa and Pentawere to reappear. Tjuyu moved beside me soon after they disappeared into the darkness. Was she going to confront me for being invited to walk with Pentawere? The sun was high and beating down relentlessly. She, as well as the highest–ranking dignitaries, was now accompanied by a servant bearing a sunshade. Surprisingly, she shared her shade with me.
“Have you ever visited Pi–Ramesses, Neset?” she asked.
“I was fortunate enough to attend the triumph of Ramesses, fourth of his name. Pharaoh wanted me to dig up his favorite flowers and replant them in his garden in Djeme.”
“You didn’t receive an invitation to attend Pentawere in Pi–Ramesses after he returned from his brother’s funeral?” she asked innocently.
Tjuyu did consider me a rival, after the procession. She probably believed I’d lied to her about me and Pentawere earlier. Which I had. “No, My Lady. Did you?”
“Of course. I suppose a gardener wouldn’t. I’m so glad I’ve finally got him to myself. The weeks I was at Pi–Ramesses I was lost in a crowd of Pentawere’s former lovers – Bunefer and Hui and her sister Kensuw and my cousin Nedjemib. Women from all over the valley.”
I fought to remain calm. Tjuyu was trying to get under my skin.
“Why did Pentawere escort you during the Procession?” she asked sharply.
Jealous and envious. “My grandfather died a week ago, My Lady. As I told you and your father yesterday, he was very close to Pharaoh. I think Pharaoh probably asked His Majesty to include me in the procession as a sign of respect for his old friend. It had nothing to do with me personally.”
“Your grandfather was a soldier?”
“When he was young. He fought with Pharaoh against the valley’s enemies three times. Grandfather led archers and served as Pharaoh’s translator. After Grandfather was wounded too badly to fight anymore Pharaoh put him in charge of his gardens.”
“I attend Pharaoh’s banquets at Djeme during holidays along with my father,” Tjuyu sniffed haughtily. She was trying to impress me and make me feel inadequate. “Have you ever been inside Pharaoh’s per’aa?”
“I decorate His Majesty’s per’aa daily with flowers, and his hall for banquets.”
“It must be galling that he doesn’t invite you to his feasts.”
I shrugged. An opportunity to get a dig of my own in, put Tjuyu in her place. “From what I hear, banquets are crowded and noisy and few attendees actually get to speak with Pharaoh.”
“Quite true.”
“He and I talk every morning while I’m watering his favorite flowers. Much more intimate.”
Shock registered on Tjuyu’s face. “You? Talk to Pharaoh?”
“For years. Just after dawn. He’s a very pleasant man. God–like, of course.”
Murmuring rose as Pentawere and Harwa emerged from the tomb, carrying the statue wearing the new clothes Pharaoh’s seamstresses had sewn for him in Djeme.
My conversation with Tjuyu thankfully ended.
“Hail Osiris, reborn!” Harwa cried.
The crowd broke into cheers and glad shouts.
“We return now to Osiris’ temple, in triumph, to restore him to his rightful place!” Harwa called.
The procession reformed and we headed down the Processional Way, the crowd falling in behind the barque shrine and Harwa and the priests. Tjuyu and I flanked Pentawere this time. She’d identified me as her rival for his affections; she wasn’t about to let Pentawere out of her sight. Columns of smoke near the temple told me the cattle and sheep that had been sacrificed for today’s feast were already being roasted. The feast promised to be massive.
“How was it inside the tomb?” I asked Pentawere.
“Dark and stuffy. A central chamber with many rooms to either side. I suppose they’d been filled with grave goods once, but they’re empty now. I didn’t go all the way to the center. I sat on the bottom step and waited for Harwa. He did a lot of chanting to Osiris.”
***
Pentawere headed north to Pi–Ramesses after the festival and I returned to Djeme along with the officials who’d accompanied us to Abdju. Tjuyu had monopolized Pentawere the duration of our stay, sitting beside him during each nightly banquet, taking him on tour after tour of temples and pyramids every day. I’d been mostly alone, wandering among the tombs of the first kings, making offerings beside their stelae, recalling the stories of their lives, imagining everything they’d gone through as they’d unified the valley and established kingly rule. A couple of nights Pentawere and I managed to slip away from town and rendezvous on the desert away from prying eyes. We’d spent hours simply holding each other, talking and dreaming about our future together, savoring the precious hours. We’d said our goodbyes among my ancestors’ tombs at dawn the day of our separation.
Our parting had been both sad and hopeful; after spending so much glorious time together we were going to miss each other terribly, yet we were both convinced we were destined to save Pharaoh from his son and marry and never be separated again. It was likely we wouldn’t see each other for another nine months until Pentawere returned to Djeme for the Beautiful Feast of the Valley. That was a very important holiday, lasting eleven days. Tiye wouldn’t be able to keep him away.
Once back home, faced with our long separation, wanting to pack each day with so much activity I wouldn’t have time to dwell on Pentawere’s absence, I threw myself headlong into my new responsibilities.
I awakened each day in the tiny hut I used to share with Grandfather but was now mine, made my breakfast, watered the flowers on the tower stairs, spoke with Pharaoh. So many times I wanted to warn him about Ramesses but I always held back, knowing Pentawere was right to urge caution. I noted an occasional new face among Pharaoh’s bodyguards; Pentawere was inserting men loyal to him, as we’d planned. I occasionally casually asked those who worked for me if they’d heard anything unusual as they went about the east and west banks. So far no one had. After Pharaoh left to awaken the god in the temple I went to Djeme’s garden and met with the overseers who now reported to me to go over the work to be accomplished that day. They were all good men and had, some more reluctantly than others, accepted me as their chief. Grandfather had relied on them and so did I. So much work needed to be done on both sides of the river, so many gardens to be tended, so many fields to be planted and harvested, so many temples and shrines to be decorated.
I continued to place fresh flowers in the audience hall personally whenever Pharaoh was in residence at Djeme, which was the majority of the time.
During the months the inundation covered the valley I finally launched the project I’d discussed with Pharaoh at our first meeting – creating a special garden at Henketankh, the temple of millions of years of the third Thutmose. Early one morning I crossed the flooded valley and river in a small boat and landed at Ipet–Isut’s stone quay, carrying sheets of papyrus and reed pens and ink cakes and a mixing palette in a scribe’s case. Ipet–Isut – Chosen of Places – was a great sacred walled complex north of Waset where the valley’s kings and pharaohs had been constructing temples and courtyards and columns and pylons and hypostyle halls and shrines and obelisks and colossal statues for almost eight hundred years. I walked east up the Way of Offering and through a few pylons and courtyards and the hypostyle hall of Seti and Ramesses the Great, then past obelisks and temples dedicated to various gods. I heard splashing and conversation from south of the wall enclosing Amen’s ancient courtyard. I paused, looked. Priests were ritually bathing in the sacred lake in preparation for the day’s ceremonies. Nearby obelisks were reflected on the lake’s surface. Swallows danced above the rose– and gold–colored water. Sacred geese trailed wakes as they paddled about.
I continued on to Akh–Menou, Brilliant of Monuments, Thutmose’s spectacular temple.
It was my favorite sacred building in the entire complex. I’d visited many times, helping Grandfather place garlands for important ceremonies. The temples and shrines within
Ipet–Isut were almost too numerous to count, the first of them erected by the first King Senwosret and added to by every ruler since the first Amenhotep. I counted myself blessed that I’d been able to wander freely among spectacular structures that were off limits to so many in the valley. In one room of Akh–Menou stood a six–foot tall red granite statue of Thutmose, and in another Thutmose in the guise of a sphinx. Though I knew he’d been the valley’s mightiest pharaoh, overlord of a vast empire, he looked approachable to me – his triangular face tapered from broad heavy cheekbones to a narrow chin, with a large curved nose, a slight knowing smile, and wide–open eyes. I couldn’t say the same about some of the other pharaohs portrayed on the thousands of statues that lined courtyards and temples and halls throughout Ipet–Isut.
Thutmose had erected Akh–Menou for his Heb–Sed, and the architecture and decoration reflected that emphasis. I passed between two sixteen–sided columns and two tall statues of Thutmose in the guise of Osiris, wrapped as a mummy, and entered the temple foyer. Another sixteen–sided column stood inside just beyond the door. Straight ahead was a corridor with nine small storage rooms in a row on its right hand side. From the reliefs carved on the walls before each I knew the rooms contained ritual equipment. The three nearest me held bread and vases and wine that were used each day to honor the god. The corridor’s long north wall was decorated with scenes of Pharaoh’s Heb–Sed. Thutmose had ruled for about five decades, and so he’d celebrated numerous renewal festivals.
I turned left into the great festival hall, almost one hundred–fifty feet wide and more than fifty deep. Two rows of ten columns supported a high roof over the center aisle, the columns uniquely tapering towards their base and painted red to imitate the wooden poles that supported tents during Heb–Sed celebrations. To either side of the central aisle were thirty–two shorter pillars supporting lower sections of the roof, permitting clerestory lighting of the hall in the gap between the sections. The figures on the columns depicted Thutmose with various gods. Many of the images had been defaced long ago by the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten, according to Grandfather. The columns, ceiling, walls and lintels were all carved and brightly painted. Much of the ceiling was blue, like the sky.
The wall to my left, past the foyer, contained a list of kings, much like the one at Abdju. I paused and counted them – sixty–one in all, beginning with Sneferu, who’d erected three of the pyramids I’d glimpsed while passing Meidum and Dahshur on my trip to Pi–Ramesses. The list was shorter than the one in Seti’s temple at Abdju, for it was much older. It was also a political document, recording kings who were important to Waset and ancestral to Thutmose to justify his reign as pharaoh. His stepmother and co–ruler, Hatshepsut, was not on it.
I walked down the right side of the festival hall, awed by its magnificence. About three–quarters of the way through I turned right into the room called the Botanical Garden, the chamber within Akh–Menou I liked most, one I’d visited every chance I could since I was a young girl. It was almost fifty feet long and twenty wide, with four papyriform columns down its midline. The walls were carved with images of plants and animals Thutmose had encountered during a campaign to Setjet in the twenty–fifth year of his reign. My ancestor Tjanuni, Pharaoh’s military scribe, had recorded this flora and fauna during the campaign and afterwards overseen its carving onto these walls. He’d carried many plant specimens back to the valley for Pharaoh and had planted them in the gardens of his relatives in Ta Set Maat and in those of Thutmose’s officials in Waset; it was their descendants in my garden on my roof that had been destroyed the day of Mesedptah’s execution. The years I’d trailed Grandfather around the east and west banks I’d noted many times remnants of those exotic flowers and trees in private and temple gardens, still flourishing after nearly three hundred–fifty years.
The images on the walls depicted parts of plants and animals, rare birds, flowers, trees, the internal organs of animals, small parts of exotic flowers, strange seeds, misshapen gourds, even deformed cattle with three horns or two tails. Some images were so bizarre that Thutmose’s contemporaries had doubted they were of actual animals and plants. My ancestor had added an inscription at Pharaoh’s command: I swear, as Re loves me, as my father, Amen, favors me, all these things happened in the truth – I have not written fiction about that which really happened to my Majesty.
The images made this room extremely important. As Thutmose had expanded the valley’s borders during his reign, so too had Amen’s domain expanded, for he’d created the world and so the new plants and animals discovered by Pharaoh must also have been created by him. The specimens carved on these walls proved that Amen was not a god of our valley alone, but a universal god whose powers extended into the world. Wretches beyond the valley believed a god’s power was limited to the people who made offerings to him and the land where his temples were built. But this room proved that Amen was the most powerful god the world had ever known.
The images were carved in very low raised relief. They were easiest to see in the raking light of early morning. As the day progressed figures and inscriptions were much harder to make out. Because of that, I planned to record for just a few hours each day. I unpacked my case, laid out sheets of papyrus, mixed water with my black ink cake on a small palette, took up my reed. I sat cross–legged with the sheet of papyrus across my lap and stared at the first section of wall and carefully copied the images and inscriptions.
It took several weeks for me to complete this first phase of my project. After my recording session each morning I spent the rest of the day overseeing Pharaoh’s gardens. At night I sat at a table in my hut illuminated by flickering lamplight, writing in red ink beside the images on the papyrus the locations of gardens where I recalled seeing the plants.
That phase finished, I began searching for the plants I hadn’t accounted for, and there were many. I spent weeks closely inspecting the gardens of all the temples on the west bank. Then, backed by Pharaoh’s authority, I investigated the private gardens of every house in Waset. While most of the town consisted of drab, ill–lit, crowded huts inhabited by both people and livestock, some of the land’s high officials had fine gardens within their much larger houses’ outer walls. By the time the waters of the inundation began to recede I’d identified a good portion of Thutmose’s plants and believed I’d find no more. I assumed the rest either hadn’t been carried back to Waset as specimens or hadn’t thrived when planted here and later died. I did, however, find remnants of other plants that were unique to where they were growing in the valley. On the plain east of the ruins of Hatshepsut’s spectacular temple in the bay of cliffs I even found a few stunted incense trees. As far as I knew they were native to the fabled land of Punt. I supposed Hatshepsut’s traders had brought them back from an expedition and planted them on the grounds of her temple. Amazingly, images of that very expedition and those very trees were etched on the wall of one of the verandas of her temple of millions of years. The actual gardens that had once graced that magnificent structure were gone, but the drawings remained.
Once I’d created an inventory of available plants, I designed the layout of the new garden – where each type of flower would be planted and how it would blend into the next, where shade trees would go, where pools and channels and footpaths would be located, how water would be brought from the canal and pass through the garden without becoming stagnant. Once I was satisfied with my plan, and Pharaoh approved it, I transferred it from papyrus onto a large ostracon so that all who worked on the garden could use it as a reference.
The garden was to cover the ground between the entrance of Thutmose’s temple and the canal and harbor to its southeast. I left room for a wide path through its center that I planned to pave with stone, with pools and flowers on both sides and shade trees at the northernmost and southernmost edges. All who approached the temple from the harbor’s quay after I was done would stroll through a colorful sweetly–scented space. I put a crew to work preparing the ground, digging d
itches and channels and pools, laying great paving stones, hauling rich soil from the cultivated strip along the river. When all was ready I began the most important phase of the project, the actual transplanting of flowers and trees from their current locations to the new garden. I did much of this work myself, digging up the most delicate flowers, carefully packing their roots, moving them a few at a time to the new garden and immediately planting them. In time I identified men and women among my workers I could trust and then the work began to go more quickly.
One midday early in the project I was in the garden, the sun beating down on my bare back, sweat dripping from brow and arms and sticking my skirt to my legs. I was making a small correction to the ostracon containing the master plan when a shadow fell over me.
“A drink, My Lady?”
One of the temple’s guards. I’d noted him watching me the past weeks as I’d prepared the site. He was a few years older than me, head shaved, piercing eyes dark, regular height, a bit stocky, handsome. He was well–muscled and looked like he knew how to use the dagger he carried in his worn leather belt. I took the proffered waterskin and drank deeply. “Thank you…”
“Bunakhtef, My Lady.”
My stomach embarrassingly rumbled with hunger. I’d been working without pause since first light.
“I’ve a bit of a meal from the temple, if you’d like to share,” Bunakhtef offered.
We sat together in the shade of the temple wall. I thoughtfully bit into an onion as my gaze swept over the partly–constructed infrastructure of the garden, then the harbor and canal, where a few boats rode at anchor, then the green fields that reached to the river.
“Why are you planting a garden here after so many hundreds of years without?” Bunakhtef asked curiously.
“To honor Osiris–pharaoh Thutmose,” I replied. “He collected many plants on his expeditions that hadn’t been seen before in the valley. Planting all of them here, in one place, will create the most unique garden in the valley. Surely the gods will look upon him with favor.”
The Gardener and the Assassin Page 39
